Movies & Mass Culture

Autorentext

Belton, John

Klappentext

This book looks at the ways in which American identity shapes and is shaped by motion pictures. Movies serve not only as texts that document who we think we are or were, but they also reflect changes in our self-imaged, tracing the transformation from one kind of America to another.

Inhalt

Introduction
Mass Culture, the Individual, and the Mass
Apocalyptic Cinema: D. W. Griffith and the Aesthetics of Reform
The Crowd, the Collective, and the Chorus: Busby Berkeley and the New Deal
The Regulation of Desire: From Mass Consumption to Mass Morality
The Carole Lombard in Macy's Window
The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema
The Production Code
The Dark Side of Mass Culture: Film Noir
Notes on Film Noir
Woman's Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir
Mass Production, the Failure of the New, and Reaganite Cinema
Postmodernism and Consumer Society
Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era
Against the Grain
New U.S. Black Cinema
The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators
Select Bibliography
Contributors
Index